TODO

[Anatoly Korzun]

Hi,

I've been using KDevelop for several months already 
(along with some other tools), and I'd like to thank 
its authors for the remarkable product.

KDevelop 2 has brought lots of improvements 
(though it seems to have some new bugs too:-). 
Below are my suggestions about features, 
which I believe could make KDevelop even better:

1. Something like a workspace and projects, 
or a project and subprojects. I mean that the 
final project may consist of a number of subprojects, 
which may share different pieces of common code. 
Programmer should be able to set the dependencies 
between projects and set separate properties 
(e.g. compiler and linker flags) for each project. 
You can see a similar thing in MS Visual Studio.

2. More control over creating static and shared 
libraries. KDevelop 2 makes a good step to better 
managing shared libraries, but there are still 
unresolved issues (in my opinion, of course:-). 
E.g., you cannot place (without manually editing 
Makefile.am) your binaries somewhere in a desired 
place outside the directory where they are created. 
Another example of inconvenience is the 
uncontrollable generation of static libraries 
out of each directory with a source code, even 
if all you need is just a single binary file. 
It may lead to unresolved references between 
symbols defined in various branches of your 
source directory tree. It seems currently the 
only workaround in this situation is to create 
shared libraries.

3. Something that would easily allow (without 
hacking Makefiles) creating custom build steps 
for certain files (e.g. running flex, bison, awk, 
sed, etc.)

4. More choice (or better to say at least some 
choice) in selecting compiler. I have a big respect 
to GCC, but sometimes you HAVE to use something 
different. E.g., GCC doesn't support 64-bit. 
You can see a similar thing in DDD debugging tool.

5. Some improvements in working with CVS. Currently 
you cannot add a new directory to CVS inside KDevelop 
(at least I was unable:-), you have to do in a 
command line, and then return to KDevelop to add 
new files. I also don't see any way to check out 
any new stuff to the existing project. Ideally 
it's good to do with CVS everything you can do 
from a command line while staying in KDevelop.

6. Some tool for creating .pkg (rpm doesn't exist 
everywhere:-) would be appreciated.

7. Finally something that may look like profaning 
the holy thing. I mean automake and autoconfig. 
For me (a person who had spent most time on Windows:-) 
it seems that the whole approach creates more 
problems than solves. Even not mentioning an awful 
mess of (absolutely unnecessary for me) files 
in a project directory, the approach doesn't give 
you any flexibility in placing your source and 
project files in the directories you wish. Right 
now I am porting a medium-size project (some hundreds 
files) from Win32 to Unix. Besides other expected problems 
I had to re-organize the whole directory structure. 
As a comparison I tried Sun Forte, it has its minuses 
(including its price:-), but at least it smoothly 
accepted the existed directory structure. 
So, why not using just a PLAIN MAKEFILE? 
Correct me if I am wrong.

I realize that your product is like a gift to other 
people, so no one can demand anything from you. 
I also guess that different people ask you for 
different things, including support for other 
languages. 
However I kindly ask you to focus at C++.

Best regards,
Anatoly